Chris J. Karr, October 12th, 2009
It recently dawned on me that a whole month had passed since this weblog was last updated. The last several months have been quite busy between work on internal projects like Shion and work on external client projects. The lack of posts was not a symptom of a lack of company activity, but rather a reflection of how busy the company has actually been.
I’ve posted extensively on Shion and other internal projects, but for readers interested in the kinds of paying work that Audacious Software takes on, the list below is a sample of some of the projects from the last couple of months.
SurveyTool
SurveyTool is a web-based Flash application for conducting web survey research commissioned by Gina Walejko at Northwestern University for better understanding how respondents behave when answering online surveys. The project was delivered in the late summer and has been in production for the past couple of months. SurveyTool differs from traditional survey software in that it not only records the respondents’ (final) answers to questions posed, but it also tracks how they change their answers, navigate between questions, and allocate their time (survey paradata) during the questionnaire without the need of dedicated screen capture software or human coders.
Pocket Justice
Audacious Software is responsible for administering the servers behind The Oyez Project and I spent some time this summer working with Francesco Stagno d’Alcontres & his colleagues in Italy to create a comprehensive mobile Oyez experience. Where the developers in Italy focused upon creating a native Oyez client on the Cocoa Touch platform, Audacious Software implemented a general RDF/XML backend built upon Oyez’s existing Drupal 6 infrastructure for use by software such as Pocket Justice. I will be discussing this work (using RDF/XML as a native API format) at the Supreme Court Open Infrastructure Meeting at Washington University in December.
Mobile Context-Aware Depression Therapy Tool
Audacious Software was recently hired by researchers at Northwestern University’s departments of Preventative Medicine (principal investigator: David C. Mohr) and Communication Studies (principal investigator: Darren Gergle) to design and implement a mobile application for depression patients that predict their moods in real-time based upon environmental cues. This project is an continuation of my graduate research in context-aware computing applied in a clinical psychology setting. Audacious Software is designing and implementing the mobile sensing client on the Symbian platform hosted on Nokia S60 5th Edition devices running the Qt for Symbian framework. In addition to the native client, I am also designing and implementing an XMPP backend using the Twisted engine for enabling real-time communication between the patient’s device, a cloud-based machine learner, and Dr. Mohr’s moodManager system.
Other Work
In addition to the projects above, Audacious Software has also been working with other clients on predominately web-based projects. While I don’t have permission to share the details of that work, the company is making great strides gaining experience using Adobe Flex with Django systems. In addition to this, I am also pursuing a couple of leads focusing upon mobile projects using the Qt and Cocoa Touch platforms. If you have a project that might be a good match beginning sometime in 2010, please contact me.